Linux Foundation Assumes Cloud Foundry PaaS Control

As part of an effort to ensure that implementations of the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment are consistent with one another, the Linux Foundation, in conjunction with EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Pivotal, SAP and VMware, announced today the formation of the Cloud Foundry Foundation project.

Jim Zemlin, executive director for the Linux Foundation, says the primary goal of the Cloud Foundry Foundation is to make certain that applications developed for Cloud Foundry can actually be ported between implementations. While multiple vendors have committed to embrace Cloud Foundry, Zemlin says implementations of an open source project can vary widely. It will be the job of the Cloud Foundry project to make sure guardrails are in place that ensure applications are actually portable between environments.

As the primary developer of Cloud Foundry, the Pivotal unit of EMC already had a Cloud Foundry Foundation in place. The management of that effort is now being led by the Linux Foundation with the expectation that more organizations will want to participate in an open source project that is not directly managed by a particular vendor. New members joining the project as of this week include Intel Akamai, Braintribe, Fujitsu, Hortonworks, Mimacom, Mendix, Produban, SAS and Toshiba Solutions.

PaaS adoption in and out of the cloud has been relatively slow. Most IT organizations today opt to deploy existing application server technology on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds. But as cloud computing continues to mature, PaaS environments such as Cloud Foundry will not only make it easier to move application workloads between clouds, they will also provide a consistent set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that will make developing those applications simpler.